Sean “Diddy” Combs’s former partner Casandra Ventura testified Wednesday that the music mogul raped her near the end of their decade-plus relationship that included routine physical abuse and left her with post-traumatic stress and suicidal thoughts.
Ventura, the singer widely known as “Cassie,” returned to the witness stand in the sex trafficking trial against her ex for another marathon day of questioning from prosecutors who accuse Combs of heading a criminal sex ring.
The hours of questioning finished with Ventura, who is eight months pregnant with her third child, in tears as she recounted “horrible flashbacks” of her time with Combs — they stopped seeing each other in 2018 — that left her telling her husband years later that she was contemplating suicide.
“I didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point,” she told the courtroom.
“I couldn’t take the pain that I was in anymore,” the emotional Ventura said, adding that her husband, celebrity fitness trainer Alex Fine, stopped her from any action.
The 2023 episode prompted her to seek professional rehabilitation help.
Over two days of testimony Ventura described Combs as controlling and willing to wield his wealth and influence to fulfill his desires.
Ventura, now 38, gave vivid accounts of coercive sex parties and violent beatings that will underpin much of the prosecution’s case against the music industry figure, who is alleged to have used violence and blackmail to manipulate women over many years.
She said that in 2011 Combs looked through her phone and discovered she was seeing the rapper Kid Cudi, which sent him into a rage that saw him lunge at her with a corkscrew.
“I knew his capabilities, his access to guns,” Ventura later testified.
Combs subsequently threatened to release videos of her participating in his sex parties as retaliation, she said.
Ventura recounted so-called “freak-off” sex parties saying she participated because she was “just in love and wanted to make (Combs) happy — to a point I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice.”
Ventura, who is 17 years younger than Combs and first met him when she was 19, described how the mogul would sometimes urinate on her, or he would instruct one of the numerous sex workers he engaged to participate in the freak-offs to do so.
Ventura will return to the stand Thursday for what’s expected to be dramatic cross-examination from defense lawyers for Combs, who vehemently denies all charges.
The artist’s lawyers indicated they would seek to emphasize that Ventura took drugs of her own free will, and behaved erratically.
Ventura said during direct testimony that she developed an addiction to opioids during her time with Combs, and that during the encounters she took drugs including ecstasy, ketamine and cocaine to cope with the sometimes days-long sex parties.
The drugs kept her awake but also had a “dissociative and numbing” effect, she said — “a way to not feel it for what it really was.”
And the opioids “made me feel numb, which is why I relied on them so heavily,” she testified.
“It was an escape.”
In a graphic hotel surveillance clip from March 2016 shown to jurors Monday, Tuesday and again Wednesday, Combs is seen brutally beating and dragging Ventura down a hallway.
The prosecution played portions of the footage while Ventura was on the stand.
When asked why she didn’t fight back or get up, Ventura answered simply that staying curled up on the ground “felt like the safest place to be.”
Following the hotel assault, Ventura was forced to attend the premiere of her movie “The Perfect Match” days later, covered in bruises to her body and face, the jury heard as they were shown photographs of the actress with Combs at the event.
Ventura said she wore sunglasses to conceal a black eye.
The images contrasted with red carpet shots of the pair seemingly enjoying each other’s company and projecting harmony.
Combs’s defense team insists while some of his behavior was questionable, it did not constitute racketeering and sex trafficking. He denies all counts.
In late 2023, Ventura filed a civil suit against Combs seeking damages, and the parties settled less than 24 hours later to the tune of $20 million, she testified.
Asked by prosecutors Wednesday why she chose to participate in the criminal trial that meant she would spend days publicly reliving some of the most excruciating details of her life, Ventura took a long pause and began to cry.
“I can’t carry this anymore,” she said. “I can’t carry the shame, the guilt… what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.”
“I’m here to do the right thing.”
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